Warrior Society

Thinking about war, peace and ancient
Hawai`i

Ka`uiki Head is a 386-foot hill rising
from the extreme eastern part of the Hana
Coast. I visited it a few Sundays ago, and a
light rain fell on me as I made my way over
its crumbling red lava and dirt. Densely
covered with trees, its sheer sides plunge
straight into Hana Bay. Ka`uiki is a
towering and fearsome hill, but it’s also an
extremely quiet and peaceful place.

It wasn’t always that way, which is why I
was hiking around that misty Sunday morning.
Two hundred years ago, Ka`uiki Head was one
of the most fought-over pieces of territory
in the Hawaiian Islands. Action there was
especially hard-fought in 1765 when
Kalani`opu`u of Hawai`i invaded East Maui,
occupying Hana and Kipahulu. In the
subsequent Battle of Makaolehua, Maui
warriors fighting for Kamehamehanui retook
Hana, but only reoccupied Ka`uiki Head after
a prolonged siege.

Unlike many American battlefields, there
are no plaques or visitor centers at Ka`uiki
Head marking the ground’s significance.
There are no statues of brave warriors
rousing young legions to a desperate battle.
There are no etched markers filling tourist
heads with regimental names or honor rolls
of fallen heroes. It’s a battlefield in
terms of history alone, forcing visitors who
know something of its bloody past to stare
up its sheer terrain and imagine what it was
like for a Maui or Hawai`i warrior to
scramble up the slope as enemies dug in
along the summit rained spears down upon
him.

Ancient Hawai`i was in every sense of the
term a “warrior society.” Every island saw
wars every few years as the many ruling
chiefs (ali`i nui) jockeyed for power. A few
information displays tell `Iao Valley
visitors of the great battle that took place
there but few probably know that other
bloody engagements took place at Kaupo,
Kamaole, Honokowai, Pu`unene, Ka`anpali,
Huelo, Wailuku, Lahaina and, of course,
Hana.

For battle Hawaiian warriors (koa) formed
themselves into a kahului, a crescent-shaped
formation where the horns pointed toward the
enemy. The historian David Malo believed the
term came from Kahului’s flat plains that
would have allowed such a wide distribution
of forces. Other than history books, there’s
absolutely no indication anywhere on the
island that when Kamehameha and his
20,000-35,000 warriors invaded Maui in 1790
to begin his War of Unification, during one
of his landings his war canoes lined the
shore from Pu`umana to Mala.

That there is so little physical
acknowledgment of Hawai`i’s violent past is
testament to the near-complete renunciation
of war that followed Kamehameha’s conquering
of the islands. While it’s true disease
decimated his once proud army, reducing his
forces in the early 1800’s to a mere
fraction of what they had been barely a
decade earlier (numbers that would remain
small for decades and leave the archipelago
vulnerable to American takeover in the
1890’s), once the islands had just one
ruling chief (mo`i), Hawai`i fairly quickly
transitioned into the “Aloha State” we all
know today. Much of the reason was that they
just didn’t have anyone to fight anymore.

Regardless of the fact that Nov. 11 is
Veteran’s Day, we seem to be talking about
war more often than at any time since the
1960’s. Discussion of the fighting in
Iraq—its violence, lies and open-ended
commitment—dominates the major newspapers,
evening news as well as this year’s
election. President George W. Bush recently
said he’d stop telling the American people
we had to “stay the course,” though his
insistence that U.S. commanders are adapting
to the enemy doesn’t exactly inspire
confidence.

In the early days Pentagon officials told
us confidently that there were no more than
5,000 insurgents—they repeated that number
long after they announced we’d killed or
captured 5,000 insurgents. When insurgents
took over Fallujah, we smashed the city,
scattering the fighters to the hinterlands.
When we chased after them, they disappeared
into Baghdad.

The troops that originally invaded Iraq
in 2003 were to be home by Christmas.
Officials said the capture of Saddam Hussein
in 2004 would deflate the insurgency. Then
it was the 2005 democratic elections.

The killing of terrorist Abu Musab
al-Zarqawi earlier this year was “a turning
point” in the war. Then officials said
turning Baghdad over to Iraqi forces was a
major step to rotating our boys and girls
out of the fighting. Then the bloody
sectarian killings began.

The war, it seems, is perfectly capable
of continuing regardless of whatever
tactical changes we make. There are still
140,000 American troops in Iraq, the same as
during the 2003 invasion. No one knows how
many Iraqis have died in the war—estimates
range from 30,000 to 600,000—but we do know
that 2,800 American soldiers have been
killed and more than 44,000 wounded.

Most people don’t even think about the
war in Afghanistan anymore—now in its fifth
year—though momentum is backsliding towards
a reconstituted Taliban. Altogether, 340
Americans have died there, with another
5,000 wounded.

Throughout it all, Bush has told
Americans these wars are necessary to
protect us at home.

“[I]n order to fully defend America, we
must defeat the evildoers where they hide,”
Bush said at an Oct. 11, 2001 press
conference. “We must round them up, and we
must bring them to justice. And that’s
exactly what we’re doing in Afghanistan—the
first battle in the war of the 21st
century.”

“Today when people go to war, sometimes
they go to war out of fear,” Neil Bernard
Dukas, a historian and former Canadian Army
officer who wrote the 2004 book A
Military History of Sovereign Hawai`i,
told me. “They reduce one’s enemy to evil.
That is very Western.”

But the Hawaiians, who possessed the same
religion, customs and ethnicity as their
enemies, had a very different way of
marching to war.

“Hawaiians had intimate knowledge of the
enemy,” Dukas said. “They knew and
understood their enemy. How could you call
your enemy evil if they’re just like you?”

The war in Iraq has become the single
most controversial issue in the U.S. It
dominated this year’s elections. Polls show
a constant majority of citizens now feel the
war was mismanaged, bungled or just plain
wrong to begin with.

Precise descriptions of what war was like
in old Hawai`i—to say nothing of life in
general—isn’t possible. Honest historians
disagree about the interpretation and
importance of various events and
personalities. But one thing Dukas told me
is that historians seem pretty certain that
the anger and bitterness many Americans feel
towards our current wars didn’t exist in old
Hawai`i.

“War was absolutely, perfectly accepted
as normal,” Dukas said. “I don’t get any
idea that Hawaiians would have challenged
this. They weren’t revolutionary thinkers as
we would think of them. Their world was
pretty straightforward.”

Then again, the old Hawaiians only fought
for very specific reasons. These reasons may
seem strange to us modern people, but they
were deadly serious back then.

Before Kamehameha united the islands,
many ali`i juggled shifting alliances in
relentless bids for control. For them, power
came through mana—the “life force” they
believed showed itself as various physical
or mental skills. “While success in battle
might understandably enhance a chief’s mana,
the opposite was equally true—defeat was an
indication of the god’s displeasure and
viewed as the evident withdrawal of mana,”
Dukas wrote in his book.

And that meant battle after battle after
battle. To keep things from getting too far
out of hand, society constructed a series of
rules governing combat. For instance, Dukas
outlined in his book how there was to be no
fighting during the rainy season ceremonies
of Makahiki. The cutting down of an enemy’s
coconut palm was a vicious declaration of
war, while emissaries carrying a white stone
to an enemy camp could defuse tensions. Wars
began with the construction of elaborate
heiau, which sent an unmistakable sign to
the enemy that matters had gotten very
serious.

Mana governed war fighting and set rigid
rules, though much wider in certain
circumstances than is currently allowable.
For instance, oral history cited by Dukas
indicates that carving the bones of fallen
enemies into fishhooks was a perfectly
acceptable practice.

Combat itself—in contrast to today’s
push-button warfare of GPS missiles,
laser-guided bombs and aerial drones—was
ferocious. Spears—both the extremely long
pololu and the shorter elau ihe—saw
widespread employment as a kind of
artillery, as were daggers (pahoa) and
flattened clubs lined with shark teeth
(leiomano).

`Ohele—the most proficient warriors in
the order of battle—were skilled in lua, a
form of martial arts sometimes called “the
art of breaking bones.” Lua was thought to
be lost for many years until the early
1970s, when five men tracked down Charles W.
Kenn, then the only known living lua
practitioner. From him they spent years
training in lua and learning how ancient
`ohele would pluck all the hair from their
bodies and oil their skin, making them
difficult to grab hold of during battle.

And then there were more Western
implements, used most famously at the Battle
of Kepaniwai in the `Iao Valley.

“This battle for Maui is said to be one
of the most bitter ever fought on Hawaiian
soil,” reads a visitor display at the `Iao
Valley. “As the warriors reached `Iao, their
shouts of defiance echoed throughout the
valley.”

What the displays don’t convey to
visitors is the all-or-nothing zeal
Kamehameha and his army carried into the
valley. According to historian Stephen L.
Desha, whose collection of 1920’s historical
newspaper stories was published in 2000 as
Kamehameha and his Warrior Kekuhaupio,
upon landing his fleet at Kahului,
Kamehameha ordered his warriors to remove
the outrigger booms from their canoes.

At first mystified by the order, Desha
tells us the koa soon realized its
significance when their king stood on a
piece of Wailuku high ground and addressed
them. “Forward, my little brothers, and
drink of the bitter waters,” Kamehameha
said. “There is no retreat.”

Many historians say Kamehameha’s guns
carried the day. “Had they fought
face-to-face and hand-to-hand, as the custom
was, they would have been equally matched,”
historian Samuel M. Kamakau wrote in a
Hawaiian language newspaper series, later
published in 1961 in English as Ruling
Chiefs of Hawai`i. “But the defensive
was drawn up in a narrow pass in `Iao, and
the offensive advanced from below and drew
up cannon as far as Kawelowelo`ula and shot
from there into `Iao and the hills about,
and the men were routed.”

But Dukas disagrees, calling the
assertion that Kamehameha derived his
victory from Western guns “really unfair.”
Partly it was because of the unreliability
of the guns, but mostly because the Hawaiian
method of combat was very effective in its
own right.

“The cannon, it seems, were more often a
prize to be fought over than an important
tool toward achieving victory,” Dukas wrote
in his book. “Their most famous deployments
at `Iao Valley and Nu`uanu came late in
those battles, as a final demoralizing blow
to a cornered and exhausted enemy—a bloody
and memorable use of firepower, no doubt,
but far from being a decisive one.”

Many, many Hawaiian National Guard and
Army Reserve troops have fought in Iraq and
Afghanistan. Some, like Democratic
gubernatorial candidate Randy Iwase, even
say the state has sent a “disproportionate”
number of soldiers off to war. Hawaiian
culture may have moved beyond war, but the
United States of America certainly hasn’t.

Near the end of our interview, Dukas said
he wanted to ask me something. In
preparation for our interview he had gone to
the Maui Time website and found my
story “Now Playing Everywhere,” which I had
written in 2005 about the Iraq war
documentary Gunner Palace. He said
part of what I had written had caught his
eye.

Agreeing with what I had written, Dukas
then asked what I thought Hawaiian society
would have been like if you took out the
war.

“What kind of society would you have?” he
asked. “Is it feasible?”

My immediate reaction was to think that
yes, of course it would be feasible. But
then I thought about how—horrible though it
may be—wars bring societies together around
a common goal and give them leaders. Then I
thought about Hawaiian political activism in
the last few decades, and the fragmented
nature of the current Hawaiian sovereignty
movement.

Must a people have leaders in war in
order to get organized during times of
peace? Does war provide society with a drive
and purpose that can’t be captured any other
way?

For someone who finds war wasteful and
abhorrent, these are difficult and
disturbing questions. Dukas himself did not
know, and maybe it’s just not something that
is knowable. But one thing that’s certain is
that war in modern, advanced, Western
society isn’t going anywhere anytime soon,
leaving us all plenty of opportunity to
study its importance. MTW